Banks can do whatever they want. If they wanted savers, they could easily offer better interest rates, despite the Fed rates. However, that comes out of their pocket book (read: profits) and so they don't.
My credit union has 6.01 APY checking right now. We take advantage of that. Why don't the other banks offer a similar service? Because they make so much more money from piles of consumer debt.
I do want the "government [to] manipulate market conditions as best it can to promote upward swings while lessening or preventing downward falls", because I don't want to return to the boom/bust cycles of the first 150 years of this country. Frankly, I think monetary policy has done fairly well, even in the crappy times (stagflation).
As far as Bear Stearns, I am not an expert and I have to rely on officials to make those sorts of decisions. I can only imagine that the number of people affected by the loss would be far greater than Enron, which is why they decided to do it. Frankly, I don't have a direct line to Bernanke, but if you do, feel free to email me.:)
All the economists I've heard talk about it (about 4 different ones between All Things Considered and Marketplace) have said that the risk to the market of a failing major investment bank is worse than the risk of moral hazard, in this case. And you can't say that the owners of Bear Stearns haven't suffered. The stock went from $95 to $2.
I do agree with you that, generally speaking, bail-outs suck.
If reading something by a dedicated vegetarian bothers you in 2008, imagine how this farm boy felt reading The Deep Range in 1957.
The problem is his vegetarianism limited his sci-fi vision. The reality is that people are going to keep eating meat. It may be grown in labs or grafted into the proverbial "meat trees", but people are still going to eat it. What was irritating is that he knew that, but his moralizing caused him to write that whole section on how plants are more efficient to grow, meat is gross, etc.
My wife is a vegetarian and she agreed it was moralizing and short-sighted.
After driving yesterday, I realized that one car length wasn't as much as I pictured in my mind. Actually 2 or 2.5 is what I drive in heavy traffic, depending on speed and congestion. Good visibility is the key. If you can't see in front of the person you're tailing closely, you can't be that close. Having said that, speeds in that kind of congestion are more like 30 - 40mph. I think I've seen it at 50mph a couple of times.
An alert driver can respond to a full stop in less than half a second. (Obviously, that doesn't apply to "that guy" who's smoking, talking on the cell phone, counting change for the toll, and arguing with a child in the rear view mirror.) However, full stops are very rare events and you usually have ample warning if you can see in front of the car immediately in front of you.
Tailgating is a symptom of fixed bandwidth highways. You would not reach your destination any faster if everyone drove with the 3 second rule because it would take forever to enter the highway (i.e., high latency). Cars would be stopped at onramps and backed up for miles behind redlights waiting for their chance to get in (which would never come because you'd invade someone else's 3-second space, the Joe behind you would tap his breaks, and everyone behind them would have to tap their brakes to get their 3 second gap back, slowing down traffic).
Ultimately, driving with one car length in front of you at a crazy speed, but with excellent visibility, is a compromise designed to cram more bandwidth into the highway with "reasonable" latency times and humans do it naturally.
I think driving closer than a car length is stupid, but three seconds is every bit as outrageous. My ideal solution is those people-mover dealies where your car pops into place on a high speed chain thing and you zoom along at 75mph crammed in together. Engineering nightmare, though.
Yeah, it amused me when I talked to a few parents this year and they said they were all waiting until dark to do trick-r-treating, even with 3 and 5 year olds in tow.
Just wanted to say I loved my old Ericsson and Nokia TDMA phones (don't remember the model numbers anymore...). The quality was top notch and much better than when I switched to GSM.
I can't tell you how many people thought I was calling on my damn landline. Then again, maybe they all had friends with Sprint... <shudder>
I emailed the progenitor of the paper about the "kind of video game" issue. I posit that word jumble games and MMORPGs are the sort of games that are likely to addict women.
While I agree with your sentiments, in actuality, even what laws require can be copyrighted. For example, the national electrical code is a mandated standard, yet it is owned by the National Fire Protection Association. NFPA allows free online access to the code, now, but it wasn't always that way.
Frankly, I think Uncle Sam ought to pay NFPA directly and mandate that the NEC be public domain. Laws and mandates should be public domain.
Apparently this is a service you have to pay separately for. It doesn't appear to work under Linux, either, though if you get the demo going under Linux, let me know how.:)
AT&T has some weird thing I haven't tried out yet called U-verse OnTheGo. The idea is that their Uverse TV subscribers can access TV content over the Web.
...[I]t does probably mean that the root of the tree of life, those earliest primitive self-replicators, probably swapped genes a helluva lot, so there may be no common ancestor per se, but rather a nest of common ancestors who swapped chunks of their DNA, RNA or whatever the earliest genetic molecules were.
If I may be so bold, allow me to dub them "bonoboans".
You probably don't need to all-out ban AP credits. Just restrict them. "Sure, you can skip Calculus I, but our Calc 2 is designed differently so you have to take it." Or, require a 5 to get the Calc 2 credit. I imagine a number of students in the situation you're describing took the AP test a good while before entering your courses. It's amazing how rusty one's math gets in 9 months, much less 12.
Just a thought from a guy going back to school to become an astronomer. -l
Slashdot Mirror
As a side note, unfiltered coffee contains amounts of the worst kind of cholesterol. So use a paper filter and you should be good to go.
-l
Banks can do whatever they want. If they wanted savers, they could easily offer better interest rates, despite the Fed rates. However, that comes out of their pocket book (read: profits) and so they don't.
:)
My credit union has 6.01 APY checking right now. We take advantage of that. Why don't the other banks offer a similar service? Because they make so much more money from piles of consumer debt.
I do want the "government [to] manipulate market conditions as best it can to promote upward swings while lessening or preventing downward falls", because I don't want to return to the boom/bust cycles of the first 150 years of this country. Frankly, I think monetary policy has done fairly well, even in the crappy times (stagflation).
As far as Bear Stearns, I am not an expert and I have to rely on officials to make those sorts of decisions. I can only imagine that the number of people affected by the loss would be far greater than Enron, which is why they decided to do it. Frankly, I don't have a direct line to Bernanke, but if you do, feel free to email me.
Cheers,
-l
All the economists I've heard talk about it (about 4 different ones between All Things Considered and Marketplace) have said that the risk to the market of a failing major investment bank is worse than the risk of moral hazard, in this case. And you can't say that the owners of Bear Stearns haven't suffered. The stock went from $95 to $2.
I do agree with you that, generally speaking, bail-outs suck.
-l
The problem is his vegetarianism limited his sci-fi vision. The reality is that people are going to keep eating meat. It may be grown in labs or grafted into the proverbial "meat trees", but people are still going to eat it. What was irritating is that he knew that, but his moralizing caused him to write that whole section on how plants are more efficient to grow, meat is gross, etc.
My wife is a vegetarian and she agreed it was moralizing and short-sighted.
-l
I didn't like 3001. It seemed more hokey and his moralizing about vegetarianism was irritating.
-l
After driving yesterday, I realized that one car length wasn't as much as I pictured in my mind. Actually 2 or 2.5 is what I drive in heavy traffic, depending on speed and congestion. Good visibility is the key. If you can't see in front of the person you're tailing closely, you can't be that close. Having said that, speeds in that kind of congestion are more like 30 - 40mph. I think I've seen it at 50mph a couple of times.
An alert driver can respond to a full stop in less than half a second. (Obviously, that doesn't apply to "that guy" who's smoking, talking on the cell phone, counting change for the toll, and arguing with a child in the rear view mirror.) However, full stops are very rare events and you usually have ample warning if you can see in front of the car immediately in front of you.
-l
Tailgating is a symptom of fixed bandwidth highways. You would not reach your destination any faster if everyone drove with the 3 second rule because it would take forever to enter the highway (i.e., high latency). Cars would be stopped at onramps and backed up for miles behind redlights waiting for their chance to get in (which would never come because you'd invade someone else's 3-second space, the Joe behind you would tap his breaks, and everyone behind them would have to tap their brakes to get their 3 second gap back, slowing down traffic).
Ultimately, driving with one car length in front of you at a crazy speed, but with excellent visibility, is a compromise designed to cram more bandwidth into the highway with "reasonable" latency times and humans do it naturally.
I think driving closer than a car length is stupid, but three seconds is every bit as outrageous. My ideal solution is those people-mover dealies where your car pops into place on a high speed chain thing and you zoom along at 75mph crammed in together. Engineering nightmare, though.
$0.02USD,
-l
Yeah, it amused me when I talked to a few parents this year and they said they were all waiting until dark to do trick-r-treating, even with 3 and 5 year olds in tow.
Asinine.
-l
In fairness, there is that HD channel that just shows sunrise in various locations every morning. Talk about starved for content...
-l
Just wanted to say I loved my old Ericsson and Nokia TDMA phones (don't remember the model numbers anymore...). The quality was top notch and much better than when I switched to GSM.
I can't tell you how many people thought I was calling on my damn landline. Then again, maybe they all had friends with Sprint... <shudder>
-l
... although to correct myself, this is not that design
-l
And, depending on workload, slightly better than four. Three is the new two.
-l
I guess you could have Lotus Bridges everywhere. Might be neat to have a row of bowties from outer space delineating England and Scotland, e.g.
-l
So he wrote back saying he agreed with that. No apologies for the overreaching abstract and conclusion, though.
-l
Here's the actual paper: Hoeft_2008JPsychiatrRes.pdf
I emailed the progenitor of the paper about the "kind of video game" issue. I posit that word jumble games and MMORPGs are the sort of games that are likely to addict women.
If he ever writes back (unlikely), I'll post.
-l
While I agree with your sentiments, in actuality, even what laws require can be copyrighted. For example, the national electrical code is a mandated standard, yet it is owned by the National Fire Protection Association. NFPA allows free online access to the code, now, but it wasn't always that way.
Frankly, I think Uncle Sam ought to pay NFPA directly and mandate that the NEC be public domain. Laws and mandates should be public domain.
-l
-l
I'm pretty sure that was the joke...
-l
Apparently this is a service you have to pay separately for. It doesn't appear to work under Linux, either, though if you get the demo going under Linux, let me know how. :)
-l
AT&T has some weird thing I haven't tried out yet called U-verse OnTheGo. The idea is that their Uverse TV subscribers can access TV content over the Web.
Vaguely interesting,
-l
/still waiting on their VOIP service to start up.
If I may be so bold, allow me to dub them "bonoboans".
-l
Exactly what I was going to say. Weird Al nerds unite and all that.
-l
You probably don't need to all-out ban AP credits. Just restrict them. "Sure, you can skip Calculus I, but our Calc 2 is designed differently so you have to take it." Or, require a 5 to get the Calc 2 credit. I imagine a number of students in the situation you're describing took the AP test a good while before entering your courses. It's amazing how rusty one's math gets in 9 months, much less 12.
Just a thought from a guy going back to school to become an astronomer.
-l
Seriously, our family just loves FreeCiv.
-l
Clearly, we need the Chinese to do it for us. And maybe the Sovie^H^H^HRussians. And let's not forget the mineshaft gap!
-l